Accident Evokes 1991 Losses

March 24, 2003|By Warren Hoge The New York Times

LONDON — For British military planners, Sunday's news that a British jet was downed by a U.S. missile was a nightmarish replay of their experience in the 1991 Persian Gulf War when they lost as many servicemen to mistaken attacks by their American allies as they did to enemy action.

Two British airmen were killed on Sunday after their Tornado was downed by an American Patriot missile close to the Kuwait border as it returned from a nighttime bombing mission over Iraq.

It was the third air disaster for the British since the war began, with a death count of 16. None of the deaths has resulted from enemy attack.

In the first Persian Gulf War, nine British servicemen were killed and 13 wounded from American fire in two separate incidents, and military planners in London said in recent weeks that they had put particular emphasis on improving the technology known as Identification Friend or Foe to avoid a repeat of such incidents.

Six Britons were killed on Saturday when two Royal Navy Sea King helicopters collided over the Persian Gulf, and eight died on Friday when a U.S. transport helicopter they were in crashed in the north Kuwait desert.

Friendly fire also might have been involved in an attack Saturday on the car of ITN reporter Terry Lloyd and two assistants near the front in Basra. The three men remain missing, but a surviving fourth member of the crew, Daniel Damoustier, said that they had been fired on by allied troops trying to shoot Iraqis on the other side of their vehicle.

Officers and political leaders stepped in with assurances that Sunday's accident would not damage the close alliance between Britain and the United States.

"A situation like this does not mean anything of harm to the coalition, but in many ways it brings us closer together," said Royal Air Force Group Capt. Jon Fynes. "At the base they are sad it happened, but they are now refocused on what needs to be done next."

Iain Duncan Smith, the leader of the Conservatives and a former Scots Guard officer, said such incidents regrettably occurred in movements of such "phenomenal scale."

"When you think about how much is moving at the moment on the battlefield, this is one incident, and most of these other things are going right," he said. "It is sad, but I am afraid that is the nature of modern warfare."

Britain, which has deployed 45,000 troops to the Persian Gulf, has a long tradition of sending its armed forces abroad and a relatively stoic national response to the loss of its servicemen. Typically, the grief of the families of the dead service personnel was kept out of the public eye on Sunday while flowers piled up at the gates of the two military bases where most of the victims had worked, Culdrose air field in Cornwall and the Stonehouse barracks in Plymouth.

A poll in The Sunday Times of London showed that 56 percent supported the United States and Britain taking military action, with 36 percent opposed. It was almost an exact reverse of a similar poll before the outbreak of the war. The News of the World, the biggest selling Sunday tabloid, said that support for the war in its survey had gone from 29 percent to 56 percent, and that 70 percent said Britain and the United States should see the conflict through to the end.